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coming soon – the third eddie grant novel

Treasure of Saint-Lazare and Last Stop: Paris will soon have a new sibling on the shelf. My third novel is almost finished and has an appointment with the editor early in November.

The manuscript is a bit longer than the first two, slightly more than 300 pages, but that’s always subject to change. Here’s what it looks like now:

Watch this space.

Part-Time Parisian has a new look

Welcome to my re-done website. The blog is still here – simply click on the “BLOG” link in the menu bar above.

As publication of the third novel in the Eddie Grant Series approaches, I’ve changed the layout of the website in a way that will let me keep readers more current on my publishing plans.

This is where you’ll see publication updates and news. Scroll down to take a look at my current novels, the blog, and some biographical information. I’ll be adding pages and documents to the site regularly, so please check back.

Thanks for reading.

John Pearce

My Books

What exciting adventure finds Eddie Grant next? Join the Readers Group for advance news of the third book in the Eddie Grant Series, and to keep up with the latest from my blog. Click here to join. You can unsubscribe any time.

Treasure of Saint-Lazare and its sequel, Last Stop: Paris, tell the story of Eddie Grant, the golden boy of French-American business — a decorated U.S. Army officer and successful Paris entrepreneur, but a man whose life has gone off track.

At first he was desperate to set things right, but now he’s almost given up when, unexpectedly, he finds new clues to the murders of his wife and son, and his father, a decorated Army officer who served with the Résistance behind German lines.

Somehow he and his family got caught up in a criminal ring’s lust for a priceless Raphael painting, Portrait of a Young Man, which has been missing since the end of World War II.

It’s an exciting chase from beginning to end. Eddie takes control once again and, as a fringe benefit, patches up his relationship with the lovely Aurélie, the love of his life. Will they live happily ever after?

Both books won are prize-winners. Readers’ Favorite, the major book review site, selected Treasure of Saint-Lazare as best historical mystery of 2014. Shelf Unbound magazine chose Last Stop: Paris as one of the top indie books of 2015.

The story will be more meaningful if you start with the first book, Treasure of Saint-Lazare.

The genocidal Bosnian war of the nineties has faded from Western consciousness. Not many people remember the brutal days when Sarajevo had to hang a curtain so snipers could not target civilian pedestrians, although anyone who was paying attention then remembers the pictures of those who didn’t escape, lying in the streets. The memory has …

I came late to this amusing and informative book, I’m sorry to say. It’s an amazingly detailed compilation and exploration of what the French would call curiosités or choses insolites but it’s also a broad cultural overview. It’s an example of the best of a certain type of book designed to explain France to English-speakers. …

“If I flipped a franc, it would land on something worth swallowing,” David Downie writes of his arrival in Paris in 1976. He remembers, as I do, gazing into the yawning seven-story hole where Les Halles had provided food and drink to all Paris until its relocation to suburban Rungis several years before, and he …

About me …

Alison Harris took this one Fall morning on Pont Neuf, Paris

I’m the author of Treasure of Saint-Lazare and its sequel, Last Stop: Paris, a pair of thrillers/historical mysteries that started with this question: What would happen if some really bad guys thought — indeed were certain — they knew where to find a famous and priceless painting the Nazis stole in World War II?

My research pointed to Poland and the Czartoryski Museum of Krakow, where a blank frame still hangs on the wall in place of Portrait of a Young Man, a painting the Italian Old Master Raphael made in 1514. It was looted shortly after the blitzkrieg and spent most of the war hanging in the home of Hans Frank, governor-general of occupied Poland. As the Russians were knocking at the door of Eastern Poland in early 1945, he sent it (with many other stolen treasures) to his home near Munich. He narrowly escaped from the Russian Army only to be hanged by the Nuremberg tribunal.

The other treasures arrived, but not the Raphael, and it hasn’t been seen in public since. Last year the Polish foreign ministry indicated it may be in a bank vault somewhere.

Treasure of Saint-Lazare is set in Paris and Sarasota, Florida. Click on the cover picture for more details on the book’s Amazon site. It’s available there in Kindle, paperback and audiobook editions.

Last Stop: Paris is set in Paris, Miami, Munich, and several parts of Eastern Europe. In it, Eddie Grant finally gets his hands on his evil antagonist. It’s been well reviewed, especially by Kirkus Reviews (see my blog post about that).

I’ve been a serious fan of WWII history for thirty or forty years, since I lived in Frankfurt, where I edited a business magazine and reported for the International Herald Tribune on banking and finance in the German-speaking countries. After a couple of other careers, I live with my wife Jan (also a former journalist, she for The Washington Post) in Sarasota for most of the year, but we reserve a few months each year for Paris, where we especially like the 14th arrondissement around métro stations Denfert-Rochereau and Alésia.